Wiki Profile - Better Food in Iowa City Schools

Posted by Kevin on June 3rd, 2008 4 Comments

In the U.S., one in three children are overweight. Today’s average 10 year-old weighs 11 pounds more than their 1960 counterparts. Pediatricians are treating more and more children with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, painful joint conditions, type-2 diabetes and even gallstones. All added together, Thomson Reuters’ researchers estimate the national health care bill for our overweight youth at $14 billion per year.

To help fight this dire situation, parents across the nation are attempting to integrate healthier food options into public schools. The latest battle can be found in Iowa City, Iowa, with a group of parents known as the Better Iowa City School Foods committee (BICSF).

BICSF members are gravely concerned about the underwhelming and unhealthy food options offered in their children’s public schools. The group was inspired into action after researching a 2001 study conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota. Over two years, the researchers presented students with healthy and unhealthy options (with the healthy foods priced lower), and the students overwhelmingly went for the healthy options. Iowa City parents wanted to give their children the same options, so they began the long battle school by school.

To marshal their efforts, the BICSF has created a Wetpaint site that they use to share information on healthier food choices, gather signatures to petition the school district to act on a pre-existing wellness plan and discuss top health food priorities. The group recently became affiliated with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. They hope to see the wellness plan begin to be implemented the new school year, this fall.

Want to get involved? Join the Better Iowa City School Food site now!

Keyword Tags: Web 2.0, User Experience, Collaboration, User Generated Content, Wikis, General, Wetpaint

Comments

[…] Sales and Lemonade Sales and Badges! Oh My! Posted on June 5, 2008 by Angela A few days ago, Mr. Morris from Wetpaint asked me to think about helping the China Earthquake Relief Fund. This will help […]

By Bake Sales and Lemonade Sales and Badges! Oh My! « Twenty Five Days to Make a Difference on June 5th, 2008 at 4:47 pm

This is a noble effort, no doubt, but how about someone addressing the two day outage WetPaint just had???

By Lena West on June 6th, 2008 at 9:51 pm

how can i load html code on my website

By mahendra on June 10th, 2008 at 8:50 pm

Lena,

I’m not sure if it was a two day outage. I know that we had an hour of downtime caused by an issue at our server location on Friday evening. That was fixed and things should be operational around 4 pm, PDT.

Mahendra,

We currently do not support loading custom HTML (with the exception of certain types of widgets) onto our WYSIWYG editor. We decided that there would be a sacrifice in quality if we tried to do both, so we opted to focus on one (WYSIWYG) and make it awesome.

By TroyJMorris on June 11th, 2008 at 9:06 am

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